Everything belongs to me.

I looked around me – everything in this apartment belonged to me.

When I first entered this white-walled space in a small town in the Pacific-Northwest it was deafeningly empty. I panicked. I had lived alone for more than half a decade but I never had set a place up from scratch. How was I going to do it?

A year later – the empty space is now a beautiful mess created by things that belong to me. No one else, but me. Every single piece of the unfinished jigsaw puzzle, the white L-shaped couch, the mugs and the spoons, the soap and the mop, the jewelry, books, shoes, the bed and the soft pillows. If I had not lifted my finger to acquire any of these, they wouldn’t be here.

I get out of this bed, my bed, every morning and look at myself in the tall mirror that I got for me and think – wow, you. Who are you, and why are you so cute? A little admiration later, I’d go in to wash my face with the facebar I got on transit at a giant international ariport and once again stare in this other mirror at who I see. I make my coffee, with the niche coffee-powder I know I like, in the electric moka and sit down to do the thing that made all of this possible, with nothing, but love. Not a single soul to perturb my existence, no one demanding anything I don’t want to give them, no one to claim my time and energy, no one I owe it to. Is this life of mine a rare outlier or is this just how human life is ideally meant to be, unless chosen otherwise?

I remembered the girl in the timeless Malayalam movie say, ‘Ee veettil ulla aarum, onnum, ente alla’ – ‘nothing, no one in this home belongs to me’. Why was she in that situation? Who put her there? Can whoever put her in that home where nothing, no one belonged to her, claim to love her and have her best intentions at heart?

Kerala, India.

A few days after their wedding they left to spend some time away, alone. A cozy couple of days later, they drove back and she wondered why they were driving straight to his home, when hers was on the way and stopping for lunch there made the utmost sense. Her home – where she grew up and ate all her meals until she was married ‘off’ to his. Why did this suggestion not come from this man, she wondered aloud. A phone call was made where his mom confirmed that she had prepared lunch for them already. She quietly listed all of his favorite dishes she had already cooked. It would be rude now to change plans – wouldn’t it?

She could not shirk the thought out of her head – she had known and feared that life would forever be different for her now. She’d be expected to live in a different house and call it home. She’d be watching from the porch and waving goodbye as her own family visited her and left her behind. She’d watch her dad’s car start with its familiar sounds, maneuver in reverse and leave, without her inside. It would return to the home where she had belonged until a week before. Just like that. She’d turn around and go back into her ‘new-home’ with a knot in her chest and will laugh and joke as if the most natural thing had happened.

Why should this be okay? This is nothing in the grand scheme of things, you’d say, and I’ll agree. These are just things you ‘take in your stride’, your grandfather will advise you. But why should she? If this is okay, then why don’t we make the opposite the norm and call it a day? A decade or two of swinging in the other direction. Come on, let’s try that. Let’s go to the cozy hill station and come back to her home, where she’ll get to sleep in her bed after a long day. When she is ready to collapse after fifteen hour flights and two lay-overs, she will take that much needed hot shower in her bathroom instead of being the coy, genial woman with the gold chain around her neck in her husband’s home.

Why is the natural finale to a wedding the girl weeping as she bids goodbye to her own family now that she is married into another? Why is this torturous rite celebrated without question – the photographers waiting eagerly for her tears to roll, the people all who supposedly love her, waiting with impatience to see if she’s the type to cry out loud or to control it in grace? Why does her mother cover up and justify her casual, cheerful goodbyes with ‘she has just gotten used to leaving for Germany, she is too strong to cry.’

And no, all those favorite dishes listed on the call were not on the table. And I will sit, eat at my table, thank you very much, the one that belongs to me.